The Hackenblog

“When I was growing up, record stores were a place you could hang out. In a really great store — one of those big city leviathans spread over several stories — you could spend the best part of a day flipping through the racks looking for hard-to-find records, obscure titles, things you’d never even heard of.

“Teenagers today probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Who goes to a record store? Why don’t you just download your music onto your iPod?

“As recently as 2001 there were music stores everywhere. As many as 80,000 people worked in them, according to the Labor Department. And that was a number that had been steady for years.

“In 2002 the iPod took off. Today the number working in music stores is 20,000 — a 75% collapse.

“As for the book industry: About 125,000 people still work in book stores and news dealers, according to Labor. How many of them will still have jobs in two years? Another 75,000 work in book publishing. When writers self-publish in electronic format, how many publishers will still be left?”
Get ready for the bookstore massacre
Commentary: E-books are the future and Amazon dominates, by By Brett Arends, August 17, 2010 (via PWxyz)

I think the model is changing to POD bookstores. Places where you browse the models (like haute couture), pick out what you want and have a cup of tea while it’s printed and bound in the back. There’s a bookstore with an Espresso machine like that in NYC right now, I just read about it at PWxyz last week. I think what will survive in the future are small bookstores, used bookstores, bookstores that sell other things or services, concert venues with bookstores, whatnots with bookstores, etc. Full disclosure: I never go to bookstores, but I would like to be able to if I’m ever so inclined. One of my favorite bookstores on Earth is at Beyond Baroque, but I never get there unless there’s a poetry reading I drag myself out to, which is seldom. But they have books, chapbooks, zines, and other cool book-like things of poetry that I can never find online and that I wouldn’t buy if I wasn’t able to flip through it standing in the store. I buy a lot of poetry there that way; it’s wonderful. So Long Live the Bookstore – Adapt or Die.

PS. I also don’t think eBooks are going to destroy print books. Unless we all end up living in sterile underground chambers where we read from screens suspended over our biochambers (or something – who knows?) I believe print books will be around for quite a while yet. We’re not hardwired to read books (books haven’t been around long enough) but the habit and the kinetic experience of reading paper books goes deep most readers. Shopping in bookstores is a luxury. The physical/emotional/intellectual experience of reading a paper book is almost a need. Childrens books, for example, how many copies of Goodnight Moon have been lovingly mauled over the years? Pop-up books will become museum pieces because there are no pop-up books in eBook format.

Lastly, if you drop your book in the bathtub, that’s one book. Drop your iPad, that’s your whole library, the iPad and whatever else you had on the iPad. So there!

(Also possibly of interest: Paper Freaks in the Digital Age, by Ginger Mayerson, J LHLS, Fall 2004)

Electricland – the cover: Click for larger image http://bit.ly/bUZraN

Demise of (mega)bookstores (but not books): “When I was growing up, record stores were a place you could hang out…. http://bit.ly/bDntPu

“What inspired you to write this book?

“Music and Reaganomics for Hackenbush. Iraq, Chechnya, and the Bush junta’s war-n-terror machine for Electriland.”
Ginger Mayerson interviewed at SellingBooks.com, August 23, 2010

“‘Direct from the middle class, the fabulous Dr. Hackenbush…’ Baritone ukulele-playing bandleader, singer, dancer, dictaphone temp, Mabel Hackenbush stands easily with everyday heroes in favorite books. William Gibson’s Chevette Washington, Martin Amis’ Mike Hoolihan, Robert Heinlein’s Star from Glory Road. Strong female leads are rare; thoughtful, unapologetically opinionated, get it done women are rarer still. Dr. Hackenbush has moxie enough to thwart a bus driver trying to speed away from a late boarder, to perform a little dance for the unseen homeless warming in the building lobby, to do what’s necessary when it’s critical, and to stay the hell away from another woman’s man. She can snatch the limelight from an arrogant boss with a microphone and a good high-heeled sprint, wear sensible shoes or spandex with equal ease, and balance her checkbook. Hackenbush is smart, savvy, sexy and sensible. She can carefully skim ‘along the safer part of the truth,’ and knows it’s ‘never good to owe anybody too much.’ Mayerson’s book chronicles a life like any other, without the falling down, whiny, “why me” frailties wedged in to move a typical plot along. Dr. Hackenbush can carry a tune and a novel, thank you very much, and I’m glad to know her.”
Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job, review by Linda Robinson, Amazon.com

This review was VERY helpful to me. Thanks, Linda!

Are you a Madame du Pompadour fan? Ever wanted to know more than that she liked little green velvet ottomans, jewels and Louis XV? Well, here’s your chance:

By Chad Denton

Now on sale as a pdf for a very reasonable $5 a copy.

I hope there was nothing, y’know, important in that box. Though my inner consumer is screaming, I can still hear that this box has a nice beat.

Who knew?

Which was not good:

“‘Q: You cut jobs at HP, you know what it’s like to cut jobs, you made tough choices – so are you saying that you want to go to Washington, DC to cut jobs? Is that the argument to the people of California – ‘Send me to Washington, I know which jobs to cut, and I’ll cut them?’ Is that what people want to hear when they need jobs?’

“‘A: Well, look. It’s unacceptable that Californians are living with 12.6 unemployment and federal employees are growing at 14.5% a year. That is unacceptable. So yes, let us start with the basic proposition that the federal government shouldn’t be getting any bigger.’

“‘That’s why, by the way, I would have voted against the financial regulatory reform bill….Barbara Boxer’s solution is to create yet another agency, to hire yet more people.’

“Just so we’re clear, Fiorina believes that in the worst recession in 60 years, government should not be hiring to fill in the gap, that higher unemployment is good, that more federal employees should be laid off so that everyone is miserable.

“What more evidence do we need that Fiorina does not understand how the economy works? She has no clue about the need for government to step in to provide stimulus and job creation when the private sector is not creating jobs.”
Fiorina: Higher Unemployment Good for America, by Robert Cruickshank, July 13, 2010

What planet is Carly Fiorina living on? Does anybody know?

Vote for Barbara Boxer. She’s rich, but at least she gets how the rest of us live.

“The 200,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers, Western States Council, on Wednesday announced its support for Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana in California.

“‘The Western States Council is endorsing Proposition 19 based upon our previous support of the medical cannabis initiative, 1996’s Proposition 215,’ George Landers, the council’s executive director, said in a statement. ‘We view Proposition 19 as an enhanced version of the previous proposition, that creates taxable revenue and produces jobs in agriculture, health care, retail and possibly textile. We further believe that the proposition will deprive narcotics traffickers of a significant source of criminal revenue.’

“Ron Lind, international president of the union, and Dan Rush of its Local 5 also spoke out in favor of Proposition 19.

“‘The marriage of the cannabis-hemp industry and UFCW is a natural one,’ said Rush. ‘We are an agriculture, food-processing and retail union, as is this industry.’”
Union endorses initiative to legalize marijuana in California, by John Hoeffel, LA Times, July 14, 2010

Ah, California.

“The book is set in the 80s and, of course, some things have changed in the past 30 years, but it is still a current tale, highlighting some of the struggles and tensions between artists and the business world, between men and women, and even among people of the same social groups.”
Fidelity in the Tome Tomb, July 19, 2010

Some time ago I blogged that female comic script writers should serialize their scripts online. Having since written a script for Molly Kiely, I’ve decided to put my blog where my mouth is. Or something.

So, for the next whatever weeks, starting, um, soonish, one pdf page of the “Eschaton-a-Go-Go script will post here and crosspost on the Hackenblog.com and various other places. There’s an RSS feed and we’re also at Twitter and Tumblr.

Any questions, please contact us on this form: Contact

Thank you!

The Father of the California Referendum: Hiram Johnson

“… Hiram Johnson, who had never before run for office, to seek the Republican nomination for governor. He was a risky choice. A volatile man prone to black moods and even suicidal fantasies, he had exchanged blows with opposing lawyers in the courtroom and called for retributions against jurors if they were to let off the San Francisco labor boss Reuf. (The jury, thus threatened, voted to convict.) In a letter to a friend, Johnson confessed that he did not possess the right temperament for public office.”
Page 26, California Crackup. How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, University of California Press, 2010, ISBN: 9780520266568

You could rewrite this as:

“… Meg Whitman, who had never before run for office, to seek the Republican nomination for governor. She is a risky choice. A volatile woman prone to black moods and even violence toward her employees. She also never bothered to vote most of her life. If she had a friend, she might confess in a letter to that poor devil that she did not possess the right temperament for public office, if she had enough introspection, character and guts to realize it.”

But that’s not what it says, is it?

Jerry Brown for Governor.

Please God, if you have any mercy left in You for California.

I finally got one. Yay!

“Ten delegates showed up on Saturday, September 1, 1849, at Colton Hall in Monterey. By the following Monday, twenty-eight delegates were present. … Only seven delegates, all Mexicans, had been born in the state. Of these seven, only two spoke English. The original preamble to the new constitution was drafted in Spanish. …”

“…”

“Glorious as it was to see the people seize power, the new state constitution’s serious defects soon became clear. The 1849 convention had failed to design a regime for taxation and government services. A convention subcommittee acknowledged the absence of government services—’We are without public building, Court Houses, jails, roads, bridges, or any internal improvement’—but said it was simply too difficult to collect enough taxes to hire people to collect more taxes, …’ The committee recommended that the state figure out how to pay for itself sometime later. Maybe the federal government would help.”
Pages 19 through 21, California Crackup. How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It, by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, University of California Press, 2010, ISBN: 9780520266568

Even the beginning of California was strange.

“Q: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have 3 things, what would they be?

“A: A fully outfitted frigate, a skillful crew and a satellite phone. I’d sail the high seas, rescuing people marooned on desert islands with only three things. I’d be known as the Dread Pirate Mayerson, the Scourge of Silly Interview Questions. And if I had an internet connection I’d blog about my adventures.”
Review & Author Q&A: Electricland with Ginger Mayerson, YouSayToo.com, July 10, 2010

Electricland, the next novel, advance review copies available upon request.